World: The Troubled Sky

Around four large wooden desks in a dirty greystone building in West Berlin, an American, a Briton, a Frenchman and a Russian work together 24 hours a day, almost as if the cold war did not exist. This is Berlin’s Air Safety Center, where the West advises East of its flights up the three air corridors over Communist territory from West Germany. The system is supposed to avoid accidents; in fact, it neatly ties the Soviets to tacit recognition of the West’s rights to fly the disputed airlanes. Many Western officers think Russia will one day walk out of the Safety Center, leaving the Western planes to fly through the corridors unannounced, and mingle dangerously with Communist aircraft in the area. Then the West will have its signal of real trouble ahead in the skies around Berlin.

It may not be far off. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk prepared to talk Berlin with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (see THE NATION), the Red propagandists were aiming shrill protests at “violation of East German sovereignty” by Western planes. Possibly even more significant than these propaganda noises were the sounds picked up by Western airline pilots heading into Berlin: on their radios, they heard occasional interfering signals, as if the Communists were testing jamming devices to knock out the planes’ radio navigation. Some crews reported East German searchlights on them. And one afternoon last week, Pan American’s Flight No. 609, flying well in the center of the northern corridor to Hamburg, spotted a Soviet MIG-17 fighter with six rockets under each wing soaring 200 ft. off the airliner’s right wingtip. “He just sat there, where all the passengers could see him,” said Pan Am Captain Tony Duff. When Duff’s plane entered a convenient layer of stratus cloud, the MIG peeled off and vanished, but the maneuver was an obvious hint of what could come.

Wayward Jets. The West was ready with its own countermeasures. The U.S. Air Force supplied navigational gadgets to help foil the jammers, and airline pilots were going through courses last week to learn their use; already the equipment was being installed by Pan Am on the DC-6Bs it employs on the Berlin run. Plans were being discussed to slap restrictions on planes of Communist airlines on Western routes if trouble comes. And there was another way to combat obstruction of the airlanes: armed fighter escorts to fly alongside the commercial aircraft, ready to defend them with gunfire if necessary.

But the West was leaning over backwards to avoid an incident that would risk passengers’ lives or give the Reds an excuse to start trouble. Then one day last week, two West German jet fighters, flying back to their West German base from NATO maneuvers in France, turned up over East German Communist territory, lost and low on fuel. It was a clear violation of East Germany’s airspace, just the kind of incident to touch off trouble. The tower in West Berlin could only order the planes to land at nearby Tegel, the French airfield in Berlin, for if the pilots headed back west on nearly empty fuel tanks, they might be forced to make an emergency landing in German Communist territory.

On Camera. The West German government hastily apologized to Russia, but the Communist press seemed determined to exploit the error for all it was worth. “Espionage!” sputtered the East German news agency. But, curiously, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht made little of the incident when he went on television for a major address at week’s end. It was perhaps a mite embarrassing to discover that, for all the vaunted antiaircraft defenses at the edge of the Iron Curtain, two enemy planes could fly deep into East Germany unimpeded.